I love a good throwback to the formative years of console gaming when developers had to create whole worlds with just 56 colors, but I’m always worried my trip through time will be spoiled by a game too busy winking at the camera to say anything new. Prison City, a platformer that debuted last August to slightly less fanfare than Baldur's Gate 3, is almost one of those games, seemingly itching to set a new world record for references per minute. But somewhere between a Pong-style boss fight and a pastiche of NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' nausea-inducing water level I realized that once you hit homage critical mass, you end up with something paradoxically novel.
The references may be stuck in the past, but Prison City gleefully comes up with ways to remix them into boss fights and clever platforming moments that feel much more modern than they look.
